Today it is very difficult to browse the Internet or communicate anonymously online. It requires specialized hardware and software, dedicated computers, and specialized technical knowledge to achieve anonymity online, and is very difficult to remain anonymous for any extended period of time. Companies spend enormous amounts of money to be able to identify you, e.g., identify your demographics, household information, income, and preferences, and track your online activity and spending habits. The information they compile about you is carefully maintained and curated. Approaches to identifying and tracking online behavior are becoming increasingly robust. In addition to the benign surveillance consumers agree to in the terms of use, there are numerous people and organizations that track our online activity for illegal uses such as identity theft, fraud, or revenge.
To combat online surveillance, Tor software is often used to conceal the sender and recipient by bouncing communications around a distributed network of relays, making it difficult to intercept online communications and identity the source. However, Tor has numerous limitations and drawbacks including one or more of the following:                i) It is difficult for the layman to set up and configure;        ii) It is ineffective against malware on the source computer;        iii) It is becoming increasingly easy to identify the sender of a communication by controlling the exit node or controlling one or more tor routers;        iv) DDoS attacks can be used to give up the source of online communications;        v) The Tor network is based on volunteers and the health and maintenance of the network can not be guaranteed; and        vi) There are fewer than 7,000 tor routers and less than 3.43*1011 routing combinations.        
When these weaknesses are exploited, not only can the source of a communication be intercepted and identified, but the physical location of the sender can be identified as well. These drawbacks are causing online privacy pundits to look for a better approach to anonymous browsing and communications.
Online privacy is not something just for people that need to be anonymous because they are engaging in illegal behavior, online privacy is for everyone. Similar to a credit report, companies are collecting huge amounts of data on us and using this data to make future decisions about an individual, e.g., decisions regarding future jobs, college enrollment, personal relationships, insurance premiums, associations, what information is marketed to the individual, where the individual lives, etc. Unlike a credit report, in the United States today there are very little regulations and oversight to stop discrimination, provide opportunities to correct invalid entries, or even get a copy of an individual's report. With so much data in reports, e.g., websites that have ever visited, health and medical information, GPS locations that have traveled to since owning a smart phone, emails, text messages, phone calls, apps, political and religious affiliations, social media posts and who you follow, and shopping habits, governments or lawyers can cherry pick the data to concoct nearly any story desired about a person that is very difficult to disprove. Until online privacy regulations catch up and “character reports” have the same level of consumer protections as credit reports, it is important that individuals be able to limit the amount of digital breadcrumbs left behind.
Based on the above discussion, there is a need for new methods and apparatus for supporting communications, e.g., secure anonymous communications.